Research finds connection between risk factors for periodontitis and general health.
More Twitter Files: Your Posts Replaced With “Dog Pictures, Quinoa Recipes, and Sports Scores”?Matt Taibbi. I commented to Lambert that one of my two Twitter feeds has recently become overwhelmed by cute animal videos. And in my news feed, it’s HOURS after the ICJ ordered Israel to cut it out in Rafah, yet nada in that feed despite my following people of the Max Blumenthal school of thought.
UK auditors are rubbish at their jobs
I posted this video to YouTube this morning. In it I argue that UK auditors are rubbish at their jobs. Major audit failures – on
Read the full article…
Janet Yellen urges EU to join US in curbs on cheap Chinese exports Guardian (Kevin W). Note we linked yesterday to at story on Ursuala von der Leyen resisting this US initiative. When you’ve lost von der Leyen….
China takes measures against 12 U.S. military-linked firms Reuters
BMW and Jaguar used banned China parts – US probe BBC
What are location services and how do they work?
Proton: “Location services refer to a combination of technologies used in devices like smartphones and computers that use data from your device’s GPS, WiFi, mobile (cellular networks), and sometimes even Bluetooth connections to determine and track your geographic location.
This information can be accessed by your operating system (OS) and the apps installed on your device. In many cases, this allows them to perform their purpose correctly or otherwise deliver useful content and features. For example, navigation/map, weather, ridesharing (such Uber or Lyft), and health and fitness tracking apps require location services to perform their functions, while dating, travel, and social media apps can offer additional functionality with access to your device’s location services (such as being able to locate a Tinder match or see recommendations for nearby restaurants ). There’s no doubt location services (and the apps that use them) can be useful.
However, the technology can be (and is) also abused by apps to track your movements. The apps then usually sell this information to advertising and analytics companies that combine it with other data to create a profile of you, which they can then use to sell ads. Unfortunately, this behavior is not limited to “rogue” apps. Apps usually regarded as legitimate, including almost all Google apps, Facebook, Instagram, and others, routinely send detailed and highly sensitive location details back to their developers by default.
And it’s not just apps — operating systems themselves, such as Google’s Android and Microsoft Windows also closely track your movements using location services. This makes weighing the undeniable usefulness of location services with the need to maintain a basic level of privacy a tricky balancing act. However, because location services are so easy to abuse, all operating systems include built-in safeguards that give you some control over their use. In this article, we’ll look at how location services work and show how to manage their use…”
Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search
The Verge: “..Google continues to say that its AI Overview product largely outputs “high quality information” to users. “Many of the examples we’ve seen have been uncommon queries, and we’ve also seen examples that were doctored or that we couldn’t reproduce,” Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth said in an email to The Verge.
Farnsworth also confirmed that the company is “taking swift action” to remove AI Overviews on certain queries “where appropriate under our content policies, and using these examples to develop broader improvements to our systems, some of which have already started to roll out.”
Gary Marcus, an AI expert and an emeritus professor of neural science at New York University, told The Verge that a lot of AI companies are “selling dreams” that this tech will go from 80 percent correct to 100 percent. Achieving the initial 80 percent is relatively straightforward since it involves approximating a large amount of human data, Marcus said, but the final 20 percent is extremely challenging. In fact, Marcus thinks that last 20 percent might be the hardest thing of all.
You actually need to do some reasoning to decide: is this thing plausible? Is this source legitimate? You have to do things like a human fact checker might do, that actually might require artificial general intelligence,” Marcus said. And Marcus and Meta’s AI chief Yann LeCun both agree that the large language models that power current AI systems like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4 will not be what creates AGI…”